Simon Pegg refuses stardom
British actor avoids pitfalls of fame by ‘staying home’ most of the time
You wouldn’t guess that Simon Pegg has spent much of the past decade appearing alongside movie’s biggest names in some of the most popular film franchises of all time. His co-stars include Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible and Chris Pine in Star Trek. He most recently appeared in the Steven Spielberg sci-fi blockbuster Ready Player One.
Pegg, 48, co-wrote the latest Star Trek film, as well as appearing in it. His net worth has been estimated as being in the region of $12 million. Yet, he insists, he’s still just a normal bloke who lives in Hertfordshire with his wife, Maureen and eight-year-old daughter, Matilda.
“I spend a lot of time trying to not be a celebrity,” he says, a comment slightly undermined by the fact that Pegg is wearing a designer double-breasted jacket with fiddly little buttons and a light sheen of makeup for the photos. But it’s true that, beneath the gloss, Pegg is a delightful conversationalist: smart, funny, engaged and resolutely unstarry.
How does he avoid celebrity? “By not going out,” he replies, deadpan. “I like staying in. I like being at home. I’m not really one for the ‘scene,’ that kind of thing, or trying to be famous for anything other than what I do for a living.” Maybe Pegg ’s mistrust of fame comes down in part to the fact that he found success relatively late. He grew up in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, the only child of John, a keyboard salesman, and Gillian, a former civil servant and enthusiastic member of the local amateur dramatic society. His parents divorced when he was seven and his mother later remarried. Pegg had a tricky relationship with his stepfa- ther, Richard, until the two of them discovered a shared love of movies (it was his stepfather who first took him to see Raiders of the Lost Ark). As a child, Pegg was obsessed with Star Wars and had a poster Carrie Fisher on his wall that he used to kiss every night before going to bed. He went on to study theatre, film and television at the University of Bristol.
After graduating in the late ’90s, Pegg became known in Britain for co-creating and starring in the cult television comedy Spaced. With director Edgar Wright, he co-wrote Shaun of the Dead in 2004, the first in a trilogy of critically acclaimed comedies in which Pegg also stars with his best friend, Nick Frost. But it wasn’t until 2006, when he was 36, that Pegg got his first big part in a Hollywood blockbuster, Mission: Impossible III. Roles in Star Trek and Star Wars followed. Soon, Pegg was best friends with the powerhouse Hollywood director J.J. Abrams and godparent to Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s daughter, Apple.
He became gym buddies with Tom Cruise, who gave him a cashmere blanket for Christmas — Pegg ’s daughter referred to Cruise as “the blanket guy” for years afterwards.
At precisely the moment that his career was taking off, Pegg began to feel untethered and his late 30s were spent in a state of heightened anxiety.
“I’d kind of made it (but) I just wasn’t happy,” he says. “My soul got lost ... It was difficult not being able to understand how I wasn’t happy and yet all my dreams seemed to be coming true. And that’s what depression is. And people think that it’s a mood, and it’s not, it’s something else. It has nothing to do with your surroundings, in that you could have everything, but you could still feel like that.”
Did he seek professional support? “I got help,” he nods. “And it’s something I’ve not really spoken about because, you know, I’m a private person. But I think it is important for people to know that these sort of fabled kind of material things aren’t necessarily the key to any kind of happiness. “I struggled for a long time and then managed to find my own way to come out of that and get well. I look back on my 30s as being quite a dark period because even as everything was taking off, I was struggling with the idea that ... well, why isn’t it making me happy, you know? And then at 40 I figured it out and took steps to eradicate alcohol from my life and never looked back. And that also coincided with the birth of my daughter, and the last eight years have probably been the happiest I’ve ever been.” He pauses. “Which is a relief.” And life is good for Pegg: He’s about to start shooting an independent film called Lost Transmissions about a schizophrenic music producer.
After that, he’s planning his directorial debut, although he won’t give any details about it at this stage. He’ll also appear with Margot Robbie in the twisted thriller Terminal next month, and with Cruise again in Mission: Impossible — Fallout this July. “Yes, I certainly feel like I’ve been lucky, but I’ve worked very hard for it. But,” he adds, apologetically. “I don’t really mind.”